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Highly paid footballers are the purest example of a workers’ revolution in action

Mark Littlewood

The start of the English football season has been crushingly predictable in only one aspect. The action on the pitch has already provided its share of surprises, jaw-dropping technical skills and a raft of new heroes and villains over its opening weekend. A quarter of a century after the inception of the Premier League, the only surefire certainty was that a plethora of voices would again bemoan the amount of money being spent in the most popular division of the world’s favourite sport.

Players’ enormous salaries and transfer fees of hundreds of millions are variously described as obscene, absurd, ludicrous and even unsustainable. Yet each year the amount of money spent is not merely sustained, it zooms upwards. With new media platforms such as Amazon…